Fault tolerant people

Last week, I wrote about the importance of expansion stage software companies building fault tolerance into their products.

The principle of fault tolerance can also be applied to people.

A fault tolerant individual is one who can: work toward a goal without specific instructions, make reasonable assumptions, resolve challenges, and reach out to help only when the individual clearly cannot resolve the challenge or answer the questions.

A fault INtolerant individual is one who needs extremely specific instructions to perform any task/initiative and gets tripped up by any open question, any new challenge, anything unforeseen.

When staffing any team, whether product management, product development, customer service, or sales and marketing, you can typically get away with individuals who are not fault tolerant in certain very specific junior roles. You may want them there because they can actually very good at following instructions and you don’t want anything assumed or done out of process.

On the other hand, when staffing other roles, especially when recruiting senior management teams, you want highly fault tolerant individuals.

Certainly, when OpenView Venture Partners consider companies for venture capital investment, we look for fault tolerant management teams, fault tolerant products, and fault tolerant companies, because nothing goes as expected!